


Unreal City

by Neth_Smiley



Category: Original Work, The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2019-03-15 19:08:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13619811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neth_Smiley/pseuds/Neth_Smiley
Summary: A murder mystery set around T.S. Elliot's "The Waste Land". The setting is my hometown, Santa Barbara, California.





	1. Chapter 1

If I had known such a small thing would have been so important, I would have brought it up the first time I saw the body. Thomas Stetson, 53, partially buried in a planting box. I remember seeing him, body faintly blue with his scraped nails glinting in the pyrite sun, pretending I didn’t, and running for the ME to tell me what the hell was going on. I’m an accountant proper, for god’s sake, double-majored. But they wanted somebody to work PR, make news responses quick and good-natured rather than the ugly, cruel, and stupid side of humanity. Of course, the News Suppressor (NOTE: not its actual name) wants me to add suspicion of connection to atheists, single mothers, people of color, anybody who works at a college besides the coaches, non-white people and the homeless. I even got an email from that little rat-faced bastard, the guy who talks about how we have to “take out the serial killer of Mother Nature”. I’ve stopped sending form letters, even by email. They never listen, and I have nothing to say.

The paper they found at the crime scene just fit too good, okay? Using antifreeze to kill a human? That’s something you see on Criminal Minds or Hannibal, right up there with the guy who made puppets out of human bodies. You need a lot of it, and equipment, and you don’t need much antifreeze either, in this land of sky and sun and tan-pale dust. They wanted me to put down drug overdose, so I wrote cause of death for the paper as a drug overdose, and that already should have tipped me off. Antifreeze is not a drug, I texted to my boyfriend, Lemont “Snicket” Davis, adding my best cranky-sulky-confused face over the caution tape he was rolling out. I am not paid to think about how mysteries work. I am paid to make mysteries remain mysteries, if to different people. 

Assume, for a moment, that nothing I tell you is real. I’m just a small accountant with a big imagination, and there was no body, no texts, no Sosie, no Snicket. It was all a dream, and I woke up to go to work as usual. Accountant, for a small law firm company in Santa Barbara, where I have lived all my life. Not, in fact, working at the police department.   
Well, that’s not going to happen. This is the story of a very sick man who, through some fault of mine, was brought to justice. In the course of it there was love and loss and more freaking poetry than I ever want to hear again in my life. 

Allow me to introduce myself. Sihone Emmanuel, writer and accountant for the Santa Barbara Police Department. I rewrite police reports for the press, the ones that make the papers, anyway, and while it pays well enough; I hate the work. Numbers don’t lie. Numbers grow or shrink as they are set up to, without the sheer stupidity and brutality, laid down in devious black-and-white, of the reports I sit through every day. In my world, there are no calling cards, no genius detectives, no logical explanation save that some people are really, truly, either idiotic or horrible, and that particular realization was enough to make my toast shrivel up in my mouth. 

I’d headed out early with a text in my pocket, leaving Cottage Hospital and driving hard towards Montecito. I’d had to leave my roommate Sophie Huxley there for now--she’d hurt herself again, and I couldn’t take care of her, or, at least, not very well. I’ve lost track of how old she is, but I remember when we met she was eighty-six. Ninety-something, at least. I call her Sosie, after her stage name, Madame Sosostris, Teller of Fortunes, and take care of her now that her client base has dried up in this town. Mostly. It’s not that her client base has dried up, per say, it’s that...she has. Her mind is slipping, and while I love her, she can’t read a client any more. So I, Sihone Emmanuel, watch out for her. And that is where our story begins. 

128 Reinga Way in Montecito, California, was a mansion of the old blood. It was designed to look like a church of Spanish design, and the side of me that wanted to go through art school squealed joy. But I wasn’t there to admire the architecture. I had a body to write about. 

Thomas Stetson, I gathered from the M.E., had died fighting. His lips were tinged blue, as was the area under his nails, and what area wasn’t blue was covered in dirt. The nails had been cleaned carefully, tiny moons in the dark of the expensive potting soil he was buried in, and his purplish tongue protruded slightly, doglike in death. My boyfriend, Lemont “Snicket” Davis, nodded a quick greeting from where he was unfurling police tape.   
Thomas Stetson, 53, I wrote, was found dead near a Montecito mansion on July 3rd. Police do not suspect foul play at this time. Cause of death was apparently a drug overdose.   
Drug overdose, my ass. This was creepy. And wrong, besides. The M.E. said that this looked like a case of antifreeze poisoning, but who-- or what-- would cause such a thing? There were, I reminded myself, no such thing as movie-style serial killers. Characters like Bundy, Heirens, Jesperson, Gein...they were once in a lifetime happenings that made headlines. My job, my key job, to the SBPD, is keeping them off.   
After all, nobody ever remembers the victims. 

There were reports to file, reports to write, after that, notes to Noozhawk and the Independent because they’d come sniffing around again, and of course the News--Suppressor, which was easiest of all. Same story, different wording. Stetson. 53. Montecito.   
I am not a detective, I thought, but did not include.   
I should not know that something was up.

It was Snicket who really alerted me to what it was, I decided afterwards. He was the one who mentioned that, while this wasn’t technically a murder, not yet, there was a note they’d found, under the clock he’d apparently been trying to steal.   
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours   
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.   
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!   
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!   
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,   
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?   
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?   
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,   
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!   
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”  
-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1925)

Typewritten, of course. And no fingerprints for us poor suckers.   
That night I came home, nervously irritable, rubbed my face a little, and went to find Sosie. I love her, but she wanders, and it’s a little better after she comes home from the hospital, but not much. Dementia is slowly eating her mind away, and sends her backwards and forwards in time from one day to another. Luckily for me, she passed her violent stage last year, and mostly sleeps when given the chance. My job is to care for her and to care for myself, and that I can do. 

When I got in, Sosie was practically glued to the muted television, big eyes staring at the car commercial currently racing across the screen. She loves commercials, and she explained to me, once, that it was a sort of fortune telling--showing the possibility of what life would be given such and such a product. I’d shuddered at that, all those years ago, thinking of how easily we all can be controlled.   
“Hey Sosie.” I said, smiling at her.  
No response.   
“There was a body today.” I added, moving to the kitchenette and starting on the fajitas. She has a nice set of teeth for her age, but it’s really best to be cautious. I warmed up the refried beans--ugh--and started on the chicken, onions, and bell pepper. I cut them into the smallest pieces I could manage and then smaller, till it was more of a chunky mush than anything else. Sosie slowly turned her head to me, great eyes blinking dark holes in her head.   
“Your fortune?” she asked, the creaking hum of her soft old-lady voice making me jump after the long silence in the room. Inside, I was rolling my eyes. Her fortunes have gotten stranger in her old age, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.   
“After dinner.” I conceded, sitting down to eat. She grinned at me then, her nearly toothless mouth turning it into a grimace. She ate slowly, and I helped her.

The dishes I cleared away, and finished washing up while Sosie got her tarot cards, the pack she made herself because she insisted that was the better way, the old way of doing things.   
I doubted that, but then, I always have my doubts.  
“Alright, Sosie,” I grinned. “What do you have for me today?”

Her face was screwed up intently, determined to interpret the cards correctly, for, as she had told me in confused tones last week, she had incorrectly read me. “Seven cards.” she began. “Queen of Cups...Three of Staves...Six of Pentacles...blank….Wheel of Fortune...oh.” She drew forth a card that, had I not seen bodies before, I would have gagged. As it was, I still shuddered at the realism of her drawing, the bubbles generated by the churning limbs of the dying man, stabbed over and over and over again as he fell through the water.   
“There is no Hanged Man.” she added, biting her lip. “Fear death by water.”  
I live in Santa Barbara, I’m part Catholic. I don’t fear the water, salt or fresh or dry.


	2. A Game of Chess

I like art therapy, and art itself. Lucy Megan may be my friend, but she’s also a therapist, and she’s perpetually determined to get inside my head. I flopped on her couch, looking up at her paintings and prints. A seaside above her head, to calm the patient, a sky of cupids near the door, which set the more religious at ease, and above my head, out of sight, was a print of the rape of Philomel, which I always thought was a strange choice, despite her explanations. She sat in her high-backed chair, proud and incomprehensible as any queen. I told her about the riddle found at the crime scene, how baffled Snicket and I were. Then I was silent, and she made a few scrabbling notes on her paper.   
“What are you thinking of?”  
“I think we’re in a chess game, a blind alley full of rats.”  
“You know you shouldn’t talk like that.”   
“Make me stop.”  
“How’s Sosie?”  
“Quiet.”  
“You shouldn’t take this case.” she said gently. “Look at how stressed you already are.”   
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” I quoted, “then are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  
“ ‘Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/That summons thee to heaven or to hell.’ I can be a scholar too, Sihone Emmanuel.”  
I glared at her.   
“I’m not in the mood. Do you want to come to group or not?”  
She groaned. “I’m come, Sihone, but only because you’re too damn shy.”

“Lil,” I said, “How’s your husband?”  
She sighed, taking another bite. “Stubborn fool. Never cleared anything…” she covered her face in her hands, baring her teeth in anger. Lil’s husband is practically a vegetable, lost his body and mind in one fell swoop, demobbed, they call it.   
“You could find a caretaker,” I say, what I always say, what I say and can never deliver. Her eyes flash, though at this point it’s the weakly pulsing glow of dying coals.   
“I won’t leave him,” she said. “I won’t.”  
I drink a little more water, a little more juice. I feel like a kid. Maybe that’s the point of the food at the meetings, remind us that in our terror we are children. Whatever they’re aiming for, it works.  
“You ought to be ashamed.” I said, mimicking Sosie’s high-society accent. “Looking like you do that young.” Joking, of course, she looked great, not like me, so close to my State Street begging bowl.   
She was not listening, she was reciting her own litany.   
“I can’t leave him,” she retorted to nothing. “He didn’t leave me when I had that abortion, I won’t leave him now.”   
She’s more than made up for it. Five kids, all at college or further and they never visit now, even if they did have time.   
“What’d you get married for if you don’t have children?” she asks herself, and I startle, even as we’re told to please clear out, please, we’re sorry, it’s time to go, it’s time, good session, it’s time.

And so we went into the night, our ghosts as one, together.


	3. The Fire Sermon

Once Sosie was settled, I walked down into the creekbed, like a fool. I thought of fire, fire, heavy-handed fire, prima donna to water’s overriding machinations. I used to come down here all the time when I was a kid, I thought it was mysterious and beautiful, like something out of a story. Any story, with a sacred place. Somewhere there’s probably still the remains of my Nez Perce camp, and my dragon hatchery; my dwarf mine, monster trap, stray cat shelters. When I was young, I had a friend, and we played at being fairies, till his mother and mine ended it. There were no fairies here, now.   
Now it only looked like the nightmare of any sane parent with its silent deep curves and thick grass, its deep, mystery-filled rain tunnels and boulder crags no longer so appealing. Trash littered the ground, beer and urine clouded the air. A magazine lay half-buried in the gravel and sand, flipped open to a woman wearing the words PLACE YOUR LOAD HERE on her chest. I kicked at it, not caring that it barely moved. I wished it was as easy to clean the creek’s bed, one short shove and it would be the way it used to be.   
People tried to fix the creekbed, change it. The bones of construction littered my path, and I acknowledged them, noticed them, and hurried on. We all die soon, I thought, staring at another burned-out tree, we all die soon.   
It was just as the moon was coming out that I saw the bodies. I stared at them silently, dumbfounded as they. At first I thought it was just one, but then there were two. My mind jumped to the ridiculous setup of so many childhood jokes, “all those dead babies”.   
I remember I did not scream. I did not scream and I did not vomit, not at their broken clays and their mangled feet, not at the smell or the sight, I turned and ran. I scrambled up the hillside on all fours, checking my phone for bars every three seconds, throwing myself over the last bit of the rise and punching in every number I could think of--Snicket, the police, anybody.   
I did not report on this case. I wanted to be able to creep away, once I told them what I knew, curl up in bed and forget everything but the safe assurance that Snicket was coming to hold me until I fell asleep. I remembered as hard as I could, focusing on every detail they asked me for. I remembered how I thought I heard somebody walking by, walking away, only heard them. It felt as though they were raking through my brain, rasp, rasp, rasp, even as I had nothing more to give. A headache was starting again, right behind my left eyeball. I realized I hadn’t drunk anything since Group, and that had been hours ago. In this dry heat, it was dangerous to forget. Snicket’s long, pale face flickered out of the dark like an oversize moth, pressing a bottle of water into my hands, and I drank until the headache dulled into silence.   
“I think that’s enough for now.” somebody says eventually, and I stumble into the house to check on Sosie, make sure she’s not disturbed at all. She’s okay, fast asleep, and some sad, scared part of me wants to yell at her, wake her up, make her feel something more than remembering old party tricks. I want to put a hole in the wall, scream, cry, anything.   
I remember a suggestion I got from Group--write down everything that I’m feeling when I feel like this. I run to the room that passes for a home office, grab a few pieces of paper and a pen, and sit down. I scribble swear words, something about confusion, a half-dozen song lyrics running through my head. Eventually I close the pen and shove the papers into a drawer, not wanting to write what I’m thinking any more.   
My name is Sihone Emmanuel. I write PR responses for the Santa Barbara Police Department. I look at the bodies as little as I humanly can, if there are any. In my head, I managed to comfort my lizard-brain by saying that it was like they were pretend, a bad thing had happened, don’t touch, stay away. I talked to the M.E., talked to the police, read through their reports. I did not work with bodies, and I did not find bodies. I knew deep down I would get through this, I couldn’t bury myself in self-pity any more than tonight and a few hours over the next two weeks...week and a half, let’s be honest. I need to make sure...do...something.  
Snicket was kind enough to knock before he came into the office, hugging me from behind. He smelled fresh and clean, a little bit of aftershave tinting the overall effect. I hadn't even heard the shower run. Nor did I notice, until now, that it was 11:30 pm. I struggled to my sluggish feet, mumbling something about how I had just sat down to write down what I was thinking, and now here we were. Snicket kissed my head, then made a show of wiping his mouth. “Go get showered. You’ll feel better. Come on, go.”   
I stood in the shower adapted for Sosie’s use, stood until my skin stood glowing and almost red, then climbed out and into bed, and Snicket held me silently until we fell asleep together. 

The next morning I woke to a series of gibberish texts and a series of calls. Snicket looked over at them. “Older person. Maybe from…” he angled his head towards Sosie’s room.   
“She doesn’t have a phone. Maybe Group, though--” Lucy had probably given my phone number out, she’s that kind of person, let’s be honest.   
I dialed, and got an answer.   
“Sihone?” Lil Harland’s softly wavering voice flickered into coarse life at the other end of the line. “Sihone, please. Please come here, as quick as you can…” she gives me an address, and I promise I’ll come in late for work, stay late.


	4. Death By Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lil' Toot the Water Taxi is a real thing, and it really is a city treasure.

Let’s recap. I am in a boat, chasing down a smaller boat. I am holding onto a guardrail, wind slapping away my words as we jump over whitecaps. Nobody’s firing yet, and we can’t afford to blast an announcement. That boat is not just city property, it is a city treasure gunning it at a bare 5 mph across the most observed part of Santa Barbara Harbor. I know that on that boat is a criminal, and that it’s going to take a few minutes, no more  
A shape, like black steel shot through with white, bolts from the water as we come in within reach, and a pale shape trailing a wet greasy rope of red catches everyone’s sight. From the pier, we no longer can tell the difference between shrieks of delight and screams of terror.  
By the time we cut the gutted corpse down and gotten everybody to calm down, and dropped lines to everybody from Ventura to Isla Vista that there’s been a murder, there’s been a shark sighting, shark warning, no, not a man-eater, beach warning, everything, Lil’ Toot and its passenger is long gone.


	5. What The Thunder Said

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was written before the 2018 flood in Montecito :(

It was so hot. As I walked through the house, I could feel everything staring at me. I stuck the key in the engine and headed for Montecito, back where it all started. Since this case had begun a lot had happened, very little of it good. Snicket had been threatened, three people or more were dead, and nobody could put a goddamn thing together. Nobody but me. I wasn’t some accountant anymore, I was a detective, and I was going to show this bastard what it meant to fuck with me. A woman had been kidnapped, and nobody was doing ANYTHING. I cursed, swerving to avoid a deer, and kept on into the mountains. By the time I hit Franceschi, my hands were imprinted with the texture of the steering wheel and my knuckles were white and stiff from grasping. 

The afternoon had been muggy, but with the onset of night it was getting cooler. Huge clouds had settled over the city, drowning it in angry orange-grey shadows.  
“Evening.” The heat was suffocating now, with the wind picking up behind me. Snicket hates wind. If this bullshit went through, I’d never see him again. All because of a stolen gun and some bullshit poetry. 

A few months ago, I’d read about this thing called a forgetting pill. Take one, and your worst memories are gone forever. I could use one right about now. I sat down next to the old man who’d greeted me, eager to lose myself in small talk.  
“Come here often?”   
“Yes, the view is excellent.”   
My phone buzzed, the unknown number, same as always.   
_Who is the third who always walks beside you?_   
_When I count, there are only you and I together._  
I looked up, meeting the gaze of the man in his strange brown exercise hoodie, lighting up a cigarette. I coughed lightly, the discomfort of the double heat sending me to the end of the bench. How the man could justify coming here in exercise gear in high fire danger to light up like such a goddamn prick, he--  
 _We are all happy accidents_ , I thought. Who knew what this man’s story was, why he needed nicotine and black tar in him. As if catching my stare (shit), he looked up from his own phone, a little flip-phone held with a careful appreciation.   
“Who are you?”  
“I’m a professor. And yourself?”  
“I’m a detective.”  
He snorted, and I bristled.   
“It’s true.”  
“I didn’t doubt you.”   
Nevertheless, there was something about him I didn’t like, something nastily arching in his tone. And my mind, macabre as ever, had an idea. I pressed ‘call’ on the unknown number and the phone in the professor’s hand jangled a greeting. My number.   
“SHIT!!” I scrambled back, enraged and terrified and a little amazed. This placid, snotty old man had kept us going nearly a month?   
“HOW DID YOU KNOW WHAT I LOOKED LIKE???” I shouted, feeling more than a little violated.   
“Strawmen.” the professor said sardonically.

There is another kind of autumn, one without pumpkin spice or candles, without cold and wet. In California, Autumn is the hottest part of the year, not summer. Autumn is the heavy feeling in your gut and the sharp smell of urine, the constant need for water. You look down at your hands and battered, splitting hide stares back. You spread your nostrils wide as you try to breathe the dry heat, and there is no moisture to be had in your lungs even as sweat dribbles down your spine. When you walk, bike, drive, anything, it is like travelling constantly towards an open oven. Autumn is cursing your closing pools, sitting with sweat stains across your paper, painful red splashes down your legs as you pull yourself from plastic, wincing as you receive a sudden reminder in your hand or leg that metal bites too.   
Autumn tastes of dust, not spice.

Autumn is the season of fire, ash clotting in your dry, cracking throat. You hear of fires, note where you are by comparison, listen to the weather and hope that your family and friends are safe. When ash falls, you watch the purples and reds, pinks and golds form against the sunset and decide what you want to eat that won’t heat up the house too much. No matter how many times it burns, how many times millions of dollars go up in flame like a West Coast _Dark Knight_ , you know the fires will never stop, not really. The houses will keep rising, a state-long Tower of Babel with water and money now one and the same.There is always something more to burn, in this land of blue sea and russet sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Start a story with these words... "If I had known such a small thing would have been so important..."  
> Add a child under the age of two. (Could be a picture, a friend, someone they babysit, themselves in a dream/nightmare/ accident... whatever, just add a child under two.  
> Change the country/world/physical setting it is set in.  
> Make your MC lose an item. Make it important to the story. Maybe the item in the quote?  
> Give the MC a quest that has nothing to do (really) with the titular item.  
> Give your MC a companion (Other than the child).  
> Revise so that they are there throughout the journey.  
> Solicit written feedback. # Revise and edit according to your take on feedback.


End file.
